A Novice's Resume, A Pro's Talent
John Bellucci Makes the Most of Slimmest Roles
San Jose Mercury News
We begin with an obvious question: Has actor John Bellucci ever considered
changing his name, to avoid being confused with that other actor?
"No," he says good-naturedly. At the advice of his agent, "I tried coming up
with other names, but I wasn't even sure I wanted to stay in acting (then)."
The name has been something of a burden since "Animal House" (1978), which
made John Belushi a movie star when John Bellucci was but a sophomore at
Harvard University. Bellucci has had his fill of toga party jokes. We drop this
subject.
Physically, no one could ever mix them up. Bellucci is thin, nervous,
fast-talking -- his words spill over each other. He is 31 -- "a
get-down-to-brass-tacks kind of an age," he says. And he specializes in a
different kind of acting from the late, rotund comedian.
His Shakespeare, a chosen preference for two summers, will be on display
Tuesday in the South Bay, when Berkeley Shakespeare Festival brings its droll
production of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" to Foothill College.
By far the weakest of the comedies, "Merry Wives" benefits greatly from
director Julian Lopez-Morillas' delightful idea to update it to Windsor, Mo.,
just after the Spanish-American War.
Finds facets to Master Ford
Within this context, however, a small miracle occurs whenever Bellucci comes
onstage. As Master Ford, he gives depth to this slender, shallow play (whose
expendable characters include a pair of clowns named Slender and Shallow).
Without losing a jot of the humor, Bellucci wrings tragedy from Ford, too
often played as a blustering poltroon who can't confront the wife he thinks is
cuckolding him with Falstaff. "I didn't know he had any depth," says Bellucci,
surprised himself about what he discovered in Ford.
For an actor who has become one of the Bay Area's most valuable in just two
years, Bellucci has the compact resume of a novice: a few undergraduate
productions, a couple of appearances with Harvard's professional American
Repertory Theater. (Bellucci majored in classics and English, and was in the
same graduating class as San Francisco Examiner drama critic Scott
Rosenberg.) Becoming an actor was the last thing on his mind: "I was involved
with this woman, and that's what I mostly thought about," he says.
But right in the middle of his modest credits are those two Broadway
engagements: an ART production of Ibsen's "Ghosts," with Liv Ullmann, which
transferred to New York, and "A Moon for the Misbegotten," in which he
played younger brother to Kate Nelligan's Josie.
Has family ties to stage
He came to the theater from the edges of show business -- the practical
edges. His father was a post-production editor and dubber, responsible for
the English-dubbed versions of the French New Wave classic " . . . And God
Created Woman," among others. His mother worked for a movie company as a
secretary. Bellucci broke into the field by dubbing cartoons, including the
Japanese-made animated feature "Speed Racer," which ran on Saturday
morning television in 1967.
"Instant acting," he calls dubbing. "You have to feel the feelings incredibly
precisely in time, like a micrometer." He demonstrates, calmly watching an
imaginary clock, becoming wildly emotional (with flailing arms and popping
eyes) for three seconds, then subsiding back into repose.
He adds: "I really don't think it's that great a thing for an actor."
In 1987, he moved to the Bay Area, where he had friends. "It had open sky and
sun and was a little slower than New York," he says. Like all actors, he'd had
his share of odd jobs: In New York, between acting gigs, he had taught college
entrance-exam review and worked as a Santa Claus; in Berkeley, where he still
lives, he worked in a coffee shop and was a substitute teacher in the Oakland
public schools, which he calls "really cool but scary." He thought about
enrolling in medical school, but his "mind wasn't in it."
Lands area's best roles
When the theater called him again, he found it wise to listen. In two seasons,
Bellucci has landed a series of the plumest roles in the Bay Area: Bob, the boy
raised by raccoons in "Lloyd's Prayer" at the Eureka Theater; the computer
nerd in "Pick Up Ax," also at the Eureka; and a most wrenching Angelo, the
self-righteous sinner in "Measure for Measure," in the 1989 Berkeley
Shakespeare Festival.
These, and smaller roles at Berkeley Repertory Theater and Marin Theater
Company, show an astonishingly wide range. But each "is a lot of me," he says.
"The guy in 'Pick Up Ax' " -- a greasy-haired, brain-fried, social misfit who plays
computer games on the Mac -- "has been with me for months. I have a lot of
models" -- he taps his own chest -- "for the kind of self-righteous, sexually
tormented (jerk) like Angelo. I don't know if there's a part that's not like me.
It can become watery, what my own personality is."
"Being available" is his watchword, his key to whatever acting is. "You've got
to become very porous and very available to the character's life -- like a kid
before you develop the walls of your own personality." Every role is "an
encounter with a stranger in a dark alley -- and suddenly you've found another
human, and you realize you're both people."
It's hard to believe this slight and wiry man when he says, "I really like to play,
like, animal kinds of guys" -- until you talk to his colleagues.
"People don't always feel safe around John," says one company member. On
stage, he will forget himself to the point of physical interchanges with other
actors. One night, he shoved Douglas Sills, who plays his enemy in
"Cymbeline," so hard, Sills stumbled off the stage.
"Every once in a while, when I'm about to go outside the bounds of the play,
something will just slip through," he says. "It's like making pizza: Every so
often you just have to throw it up in the air -- and that's really scary."
He finds some kind of paradoxical safety in experimenting, though it can
unnerve his fellow actors.
"If you know right away what's going to work," he says, "it's dead before you
get there. I like keeping it a sort of mystery. That's what they used to call our
art, after all: a mystery."
-Judith Green, San Jose Mercury News
August 26, 1990
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